I was at another reenactment over the weekend.  I have a picture, which I'll post later of me in my new uniform.  I had a wonderful time at it and learned a lot, BUT I am experiencing the same problem that I always have after something like this.  I have no idea what happened in the real world over the weekend.  Between the announcement that Chicago got knocked out of Olympic contention in the first round and balloting and Rio winning the bid instead and the end of the Bengals-Browns game, which I never actually saw the final score to because I was talking to someone in a Pizza Hut, I have no idea what happened this weekend.  For all I know, Chinese troops could be on the outskirts of Paris.  Actually, I think someone would have said something about that on the radio.

I never can get used to that feeling of being lost.  With the internet and 24-hour news, it's really easy to keep up with what's going on in the world on an up-to-the-minute basis, and I tend to utilize that.  I try to keep an idea of what's going on in Russia and when the next new episode on Psych is going to be on.  Going 48 hours without electricity, the internet and any sort of 20th century technology really messes me up.  I never feel quite right on Monday morning.  I always have a sort of mental fog until I've cracked open a news site and looked through the last couple issues of the newspaper, which I rarely look at otherwise.  hmmm... Well, what do you know?  The world didn't end because I was unavailable for the weekend.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the symptoms for the H1N1 influenza virus (aka swine flu) are... well, let me just cut and paste from their website.

"The symptoms of 2009 H1N1 flu virus in people include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Some people may have vomiting and diarrhea. People may be infected with the flu, including 2009 H1N1 and have respiratory symptoms without a fever. Severe illnesses and death has occurred as a result of illness associated with this virus."

Near the end of last week, I saw a list of those symptoms in an article about how the CDC should be telling anyone with these symptoms to say home instead of just those with a fever.  As I was reading it, I jokingly thought, "Cough, check.  Sore throat, check.  Runny nose, check.  Stuffy nose, check.  Headache, check.  Wow!  I've had 5 out of the 11 symptoms in the past couple of days!"

Since then, lets go on over the weekend.  Fever, check.  Body aches, check.  Chills, check.  Fatigue, check.  I've also suffered from a mild loss of appetite, upset stomach and slight dehydration.  Fortunately, there has been no vomiting or diarrhea.  *knock on wood*  Maybe I should take tomorrow off as a rest and recovery day, or rather, a don't get anybody else sick day.

Although I know I probably don't have the swine flu, I know people who know people around here who have gotten it in the past week, so there is a possibility that I have it.  It's around here and only two degrees of separation from me.  That's like Val Kilmer was in Top Gun with Tom Cruise and Tom Cruise was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon.  Huh.  That was a short one.

I haven't posted in a pretty long time, so let me take a minute to share some things that I dug up while reading the news this morning.

In July, scientists caught a giant squid (Yes, they really do exist.) in the Gulf of Mexico while researching the diet of sperm whales.  (Yes, they really do exist, also.)  The squid measured 19.5 feet long and weighed 103 pounds.  You may noticed that I referenced the squid in the past tense.  It did not survive being pulled from the deep waters of the Gulf.  (Yes, there really are deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.)  The body of the squid has been donated to the Smithsonian's Natural Museum of Natural History for research.  This is only the second giant squid found in the Gulf.  The first was floating dead near the Mississippi delta in 1954.  Scientists have known of their existence in the Gulf of Mexico though, because they have seen remnants of them in the stomachs of their predators.  That does raise an interesting question:  Exactly what eats giant squid?  Perhaps they released more information than they had planned to about plesiosaurs.

On a more serious note, the government has released full numbers for the Cash for Clunkers program.  In early August, it was reported that the top ten selling vehicles sold under the program were as follows: 1. Ford Focus, 2. Toyota Corolla, 3. Honda Civic, 4. Toyota Prius, 5. Toyota Camry, 6. Ford Escape, 7. Hyundai Elantra, 8. Dodge Caliber, 9. Honda Fit and 10. Chevrolet Cobalt.  Now that the government has released the final numbers from the sale, it is clear that this is only half the picture.  The original release divided two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive vehicles as two different categories and did the same for standard motors and hybrids models.  For example, the Honda Civic and the Honda Civic Hybrid were recorded as two different models.  This was picked up by a few news sources, and they have combined the different setups for the same model to give a single number for the vehicle model.  This has changed how the success of getting fuel-inefficient cars off the road with the program looks.  The Toyota Corolla becomes the top seller with 29,488 vehicles sold.  The Ford Escape SUV enters the top ten at number five with 21,894 vehicles sold, followed by the Honda CR-V crossover at number six with 20,106 vehicles sold.  The Chevrolet Silverado full-size pickup truck is now number 8 with 16,330 sold, and the Ford F-150 full-size pickup truck is now number 10 with 16,263 vehicles sold.  The Toyota RAV4 SUV was the thirteenth best selling vehicle with 15,255 units sold.  Rounding out the new top 20 was the Toyota Tocoma "light-duty" pickup truck, which sold 10,692 vehicles.  That means that three SUVs and three pickup trucks were "gas savers" sold through Cash for Clunkers.  The AP also pointed out a couple of other surprising sellers through the program.  Toyota sold 2,015 full-size Tundra pickup trucks through the program, and Hummer sold 15 H3Ts through the program.  I'm sure glad we got those gas guzzlers off the road and took care of America's car-buying needs for the next three years.  Now we can just sit back and watch the evil car dealerships fold because almost nobody will need a new car any time soon.  I'll call this a win for the dealerships, the manufacturers, who will not be able to sell cars for years as a result of this program's "success," the environment and the American people, who will have to pay for this $3,000,000,000.00 program.  Considering the average American income in roughly $32,000.00, it would take 93,750 Americans to pay for it, assuming they gave ALL their money to the government, without keeping any for food, housing, gas, car payments, medical bills, movies, cable, internet or any other necessities or nicities of life.  That's just for the ONE program that ran for only 55 days.  I'd say this was definitely a win for everybody!

Today is 9/09/09 which is somehow special.  I don't get it.  So it's a bunch of nines.  Actually, the Chinese believe that today is very lucky.  The Japanese believe that today is very unlucky.  It's quite historical that they wouldn't agree on something as simple as a number being lucky.  Instead of talking about why they feel that way of the significance of today's date, I'll type about what can happen when moderately wealthy people have too much money and time on their hands.

The Hancocks have had a fire truck and two cars end up in their lawn since they moved into their home in Westport, CT, over the first eight years they lived there.  They say one of them would have ended up in their dining room if it hadn't hit a tree in their yard first.  To keep it from happening again, they decided to build a stone wall, which would be stronger and safer than the previous wall.  Since the wall would be under eight feet high and placed where a wall had previously existed, they were told that they didn't need a permit.  Of course, they didn't bother getting it in writing.  The new wall cost $170,000.

Their neighbors, the Lillians, complained that the wall went into a wetland and was built on town property.  Both of these appear to be true.  The wall extends six inches into the town property.  There does not seem to be any dispute over the wetland either.  However, the Hancocks say they talked to the zoning commission and the wetlands people and everyone else to get approval before starting, and they all said permits were not necessary.  They never bothered to get it in writing.

The Lillians brought a lawsuit against the Hancocks.  It has cost the Hancokcs over $150,000 to date in legal fees.  Tearing down the wall would cost $120,000, which the Hancocks say they would gladly have paid had they known it would cost so much to fight it.  The city is footing the bill for the other side of the lawsuit at a discounted rate of $200 an hour.  The city's counsel's office did not have an estimate of the amount the city has spent on this case, but the attorney imagines it is quite a bit.  Had that money not been used on this case, it could have paid for police expenses, schools or any of a number of other public services.  Instead, the city is paying for one neighbor to fight another over a functional wall.  This is definitely an example of a waste of resources that could have been avoided by getting everything in writing.

According to the Wheel of Morality, the moral of today's story is: Always wear clean underwear.

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I very nearly got run over by a FedEx truck this morning.

To be honest, it didn't try to run me over.  It just tried to run me off the road and into a creek.  Fortunately, the foot and a half of off-road land before the drop-off was enough for me to avoid.  Even if I had gone over the edge, the creek was empty, so there wasn't much of a drowning danger.  Still, I'm a little bit irked that the truck seemed to make no effort to use the extra foot and a half of space on its side of the road to move over.  Instead, it kept coming along, well into my lane.  Oh, well.  That's not a very happy thought.

Instead, I intend to focus on the wonderfulness of an overcast day.  No.  It's not the uncloudy day that Willie sang about.  This is most definitely a cloudy day.  They are white clouds though.  There's still plenty of light outside.  The sun isn't shining into my eyes, blinding me.

I'm also happy for the joy that can be had from misinterpreting dangling participles.  In case you don't remember, those are the tiny phrases incorrectly left til the end of the sentence so that they appear to modify something that they do not.  Don't you remember your high school freshman English teacher getting after you about those, while you thought about how great it was that they didn't exist in Latin?  For instance, the last sentence of the previous paragraph should have read: The sun, not shining into my eyes, isn't blinding me.  Instead reads as though my eyes are blinding me.  That only happens when I look at something truly unpleasant, like my freshman English teacher stepping out of the shower.  Actually, that's not nice.  My freshman English teacher was a very nice woman, although I would definitely not like to witness the above incident.

Pointless and random.  My work here is done.

Where have I been for the past couple of weeks?  I don't seem to have been posting for some reason.  I've been spending all my free time sewing.  It's something that I don't anticipate ending for a couple more weeks, but when I get everything together (probably after Christmas,) I'll be sure to post pictures.  I started working on a haversack* a couple of weeks ago.  Sewing canvas by hand is a very difficult process.  If you've never done it, I suggest not starting.  It's actually only slightly more difficult than sewing through metal duct work.

Once that was completed, I moved on to a pair of Civil war drawers.  Now that those are nearly completed, I've begun working on a new pair of trousers (or trowsers as they called them in the mid-19th century.)  If you've seen my old ones, which I don't believe any of you have, at least in the past couple of years, you'd understand the need for new ones.  I'm putting off the last of my new stuff (new shoes, a sash, and so forth) until around Christmas.  Hopefully, once you see the finished product, you'll think, "Wow!  He looks sexy like that!  It was TOTALLY worth not getting posts for a couple of weeks to see that."  I know you all think like that.

*Imagine a man-purse for food.  It's very European... or 19th century.

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All the news here in Kentucky is about Memphis having their 2007-2008 men's basketball season, including a Final Four appearance, stripped from them.  In case you have no idea why Kentuckians would care about what happens to a basketball program in a university in another state, let me add that then-Memphis head coach John Calipari is now the University of Kentucky's head basketball coach.  The loss of the record is the result of a basketball player being ineligible because he never took his SATs.  Calipari was never mentioned in the ruling passed down from the NCAA, just as he was never mentioned when the University of Massachusetts was stripped of its 1996 season and Final Four appearance for a similar reason when Calipari was the coach there.  Calipari has a reputation for bringing in flashy recruits who want to play a flashy style of basketball under a win-at-all-costs coach.  He tends to leave a path of destruction in his wake due to his questionable recruiting tactics.  Memphis suddenly seems happy to have him gone, which is probably because they only lost the one season and were not given any further punishment.  The school probably did not get punished with loss of scholarships or ineligibility for post-season play because the coach behind the scandal is gone, even if he was never mentioned in the report.  Back on this side of the state line, Governor Steve Beshear took time out of his busy schedule to reassure UK fans that the report never mentioned Coach Cal.  What he fails to realize is that Eddie Sutton was never mentioned in the report that contained UK's three years of probation, two years banned from post-season play and a one year ban from live television, when he was responsible for similar recruiting violations in 1989.  Those violations would reportedly have been worse if the university had not preemptively fired Coach Sutton and the athletic director and former UK basketball great, Cliff Hagan.  (There are rumors that Memphis's punishment also would have been greater if Coach Cal was still there.)  In fact, Gov. Beshear went on to say, "I think he's a very upstanding guy.  I think that's his reputation and I think that reputation will be with him here.  I really don't foresee any problems."  This is coming from the same governor who could not get the general population of the commonwealth to agree to allow casino gambling, so he tried to push it through the state legislature.  When the legislature would not pass it, he vowed to remove members of the opposing party who stood against casino gambling.  This has resulted in the local state senator being offered a job in a different state organization.  It appears that the governor and the coach both share a win-at-all-costs attitude towards their work.  I foresee it coming back to bite both of them as well as the rest of the commonwealth.

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